Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things. Thought experimenting often takes place when the method of variation is employed in entertaining imaginative suppositions. They are used for diverse reasons in a variety of areas, including economics, history, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Most often thought experiments are communicated in narrative form, sometimes through media like a diagram. Thought experiments should be distinguished from thinking about experiments, from merely imagining any experiments to be conducted outside the imagination, and from psychological experiments with thoughts. They should also be distinguished from counterfactual reasoning in general, as they seem to require an experimental element. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/
One I like is the notion of robot heaven. It's easy enough to imagine a time when machines grow our food, build our shelter and do our work. The interesting stuff comes in thinking what this would mean for wealth distribution and the nature of society. What work would be left to do? One can also wonder what place any of our work ethics would have in such a society. There may be some deconstructive effect on just what current work ideologies are in place for. One of the great improvements technology brought to my life is more or less never having to go into a bank. The only real innovations in banking are the ATM and electronic banking. This kind of technology and similar in agriculture and industry fundamentally reduce the amount of human effort to grow and make what we need. We are in partial state of robot heaven. Our ideologies are not up to speed. Real unemployment is massive and education does little to provide job skills. We are sold life-styles and products by insane advertising. Job creation seems to be in perverse areas like financial services or bringing back attended gas- pumps. With more efficient production we should be able to afford a bigger social sector and I can't for the life of me understand why we allow competition through crap wages and conditions. A great deal of what we pay for could be available more or less free. Educational content and utility banking are examples - these are areas that could be ratinalised like agriculture and manufacturing. Millions of jobs would go. We should be asking why jobs are so central to out thinking on wealth distribution and how we might encourage work without the rat race. --
